At the last Adobe Learning Summit, I attended Josh Cavalier’s presentation on Captivate for mobile. It was a very good and entertaining presentation. Josh presented examples of Captivate courses built for his mobile. It was clear that the standard playbar and controls were not meant for the mobile world and Josh said quite a few times that you would need to build a widget for doing this or that. At some point, the subject of gesture recognition was brought forth and many wished that Captivate would include this in a future release. Well, that was enough to trigger my interest and I looked around to find a free/open source gesture API. Of course the Flash Player 10.1 has some but I wanted to find something quick and easy. I found such an API from ByteArray.org. It’s a very easy and nice API, just enough for experimenting.

So, I used this API to create a widget that would recognize the standard gestures to switch page. It’s not bullet proof but here’s my first draft at it. You can change the page by dragging your mouse/finger to the left or to the right.

If you want the widget, you can get it HERE.

Have you ever tried to get a course completion status from inside Captivate because you wanted your widget to behave differently depending on if the course was completed or not? Some people are accessing the SCORM API from javascript to achieve that but there’s also a way to get it directly from within Captivate. It’s really simple. The Main Captivate movie (CaptivateMainTimeline) has a public variable called “quizPlaybackController“. This gives you in turn access to a property called “totalQuizCompleted“. This property will either be set to “completed” or “incomplete“. So, if you want to know the status of the course, just read this last property.

In CpGears, just type the following lines of code to get the course status:

If you are not using CpGears, the CaptivateMainTimeline movieclip can usually be found by typing “this.root.parent.root”

If you want to see more tips and tricks, then just make sure you attend my session at the Adobe Learning Summit … I’ll be speaking there and presenting a lot of tips and tricks about widget!

I haven’t been very vocal about it but a few months ago I was invited to be a speaker at the Adobe Learning Summit 2011 that will take place in Orlando on march 21st. This is a great privilege for me and I’m extremely flattered that Adobe thought of me to give one of the advanced session. I’m sure by now you have figured out the subject of my presentation: Widgets. So, I’m currently working on it and I thought that it could be interesting to know who’s going to be there and if they plan to attend my session.

If you plan to attend the session, I would like to hear if you have specific expectations about the subject. The session, even if it’s in the advanced session, will not be a very hardcore code-centric presentation. I want to initiate people to the cool world of widgets. So I intend to show the different types of widgets, how they present themselves and some tricks and tips that I caught along … some that are on my blogs and some that aren’t. You can actually see the session details here.

So, leave me a comment telling me if you have some expectations. If there’s something that you really want to see then it’s not too late for me to see if I can squeeze it in. And if you’re not already registered … then what are you waiting for! It’s going to be great! A lot of amazing speakers are lining up. Just click on the banner below and it will take you to the event page where you can register online.